Between late August and early December, the unsettlingly-talented Kiran Leonard will be making his way through England, Ireland and Scotland on a sporadic but wide-ranging tour; preparing for and celebrating the mid-October release of his new album, ‘Western Culture‘.

The first of Kiran’s albums to be recorded in a professional studio with a full band, ‘Western Culture’ comes at the tail-end of a comet-spray of home-made releases. Over the course of these, he’s leapt stylistically between the vigorous home-made eclectic pop of ‘Grapefruit’ and ‘Bowler Hat Soup’, sundry pop and rock songs (including twenty-plus-minute science fiction doom epics and explosive three-minute celebrations), the yearning piano-strings-and-yelp literary explorations of ‘Derevaun Seraun’ and the lo-fi live-and-bedroom song/improv captures of ‘Monarchs Of The Crescent Pail’ and ‘A Bit of Violence With These Old Engines’ (all of this punctuated, too, by the scrabbling electronica paste he releases as Pend Oreille and the prolonged experimental piano/oddments/electronics pieces he puts out as Akrotiri Poacher).

As much at home with kitchen metals as with a ukelele, a piano, or a fuzzy wasp-toned guitar solo, Kiran’s cut-up titles and his wild and indulgent genre-busting complexities are reminiscent of Zappa or The Mars Volta, while his budget ingenuity and fearless/compulsive pursuit of thoughts and his occasional psychic nakedness recall outsider bard Daniel Johnston. On top of that, he’s got the multi-instrumental verve of Roy Wood, Prince or Todd Rundgren; and his stock of bubbling energy and eccentric pop bliss means you can toss Mike Scott, Fyffe Dangerfield or Trevor Wilson into the basket of comparisons, though you’ll never quite get the recipe right.

As before, Kiran’s out with his usual band (Dan Bridgewood-Hill on guitar, violin and keyboards, Andrew Cheetham on drums, Dave Rowe on bass), which propels him into something nominally simpler – a ranting, explosive, incantatory mesh of art punk and garage-guitar rock which might lose many of the timbral trimmings of the records, but which is riddled with plenty of rhythmic and lyrical time bombs to compensate; a kind of punky outreach. Most of the dates appear to be Kiran and band alone, though supports are promised (but not yet confirmed or revealed) for Dublin, Brighton, Birmingham, Newcastle and Norwich; and his festival appearances at This Must Be The Place, End of the Road and Ritual Union will be shared with other acts aplenty. No doubt all details will surface over time.

What we do know is that the August date in London will also feature Stef Ketteringham, the former Shield Your Eyes guitarist who now performs splintered experimental blues: previewing his appearance in Margate last month, I described his playing as being “like an instinctive discovery: more punk than professorial, bursting from his gut via his heart to tell its shattered, hollered, mostly wordless stories and personal bulletins without the constraint of manners or moderation. For all that, it’s still got the skeleton of blues rules – the existential moan, the bent pitches and percussive protest that demand attention and serve notice of presence.” Judge for yourselves below.

The first Manchester date – in September – will be shared with Cult Party and The Birthmarks. The former’s the brainchild of Leo Robinson: multi-disciplinary artist, Kiran associate and songwriter; a cut-back Cohen or Redbone with a couple of string players to hand, delivering dry understated daydream folk songs (from the Americana mumble of Rabbit Dog to the twenty-minute meander of Hurricane Girl, which goes from afternoon murmur to chopping squall mantra and back again). The latter are long-running Manchester cult indie rock in the classic mold – over the years they seem to have been a clearing house or drop-in band for “people that are or have been involved with Sex Hands, Irma Vep, Klaus Kinski, Aldous RH, Egyptian Hip Hip, Human Hair, Sydney, lovvers, TDA, Wait Loss and many more.”

Three interesting shows, all on the same evening in London – I remember when ‘Organ‘ used to do multi-gig hurtles on nights like these, and document the whole adventure. A tradition which could do with being revived, if funds and shoe-leather hold out.

If, for the last seven years, your idea of fun has been an ‘80s synthpop act refracted through a rippling slowcore/dream pop prism (while dressed like nursery versions of Frank the rabbit man from ‘Donnie Darko’), then you probably already know about Danish one-man music factory Brian Batz and his Sleep Party People project: a budding cult act just about anywhere outside the USA. If you don’t know them, then here’s Brian and co. performing SPP’s 2010 breakthrough online hit I’m Not Human At All (singing a captivatingly blank song of emotional detachment in full ludicrous/mysterious bunnygarb, like the Residents might have done if they’d taken their cues from Beatrix Potter and Dick Luna rather than Moondog and Harry Partch).

Though their music was initially inspired by a battered old piano, Boards Of Canada, Erik Satie and David Lynch, Sleep Party People have subsequently been dogged by lazy comparisions to the calving-iceberg noise cascades of Mogwai and Sigur Rós. A real shame, since it hustles them into the cliched cloisters of that already overpopulated cathedral-of-sound; and it’s unfair to a band who’ve never really opted to slump enigmatically in the middle of a haze of effects pedals. This year’s new album, ‘Lingering’, shows a dramatic evolution and broadening of Sleep Party People’s perspective; Brian losing his fey leveret mewl and adopting a sweet psychedelic coo as he steps up to meet (on the one hand) the fantastically inventive pop likes of Everything Everything or Dutch Uncles, and (on the other) the dreamy rattle and moonshine musings of Pram.

There’s also something of the loping grooves of Can in SPP’s current workings, but in truth there’s a far bigger tranche of sunny wine-blurred ‘60s Europop, dressed up in new trappings of clinking, shattering piano loops and ghostly keyboards, windup bass and bell-clock tinkles. Lyrical preoccupations (blossoming from early mumbles to open-hearted singing) stay half-in and half-out of dreamscapes and betray a transmogrificational fascination with different modes of life, Bryan imagining oceans covered in flesh or himself as a thinking, feeling tree. On ‘Salix And His Soil’, the band beam and pulse like a feyer Everything Everything; on ‘The Sun Will Open Its Core’, they’re a full-on love up between New Order and The Flaming Lips. It’s captivating stuff. See and hear for yourselves as they drop by London via their current European tour.

Political artscreamers Torycore (or #Torycore) define themselves simply, succinctly and savagely – “bullshit Tory rhetoric + brutal avantgarde metal = #TORYCORE”. They’re made up of two theatre-makers – Lucy Ellinson (Third Angel, Deaf and Hearing Ensemble, the RSC) on bellowing vocals and Chris Thorpe (Unlimited Theatre) on scourging guitar – and one full-time musician, Steve Lawson (better known as a cuddly looping bass guitarist with ambient jazzitude and a knack for equally loopy stand-up patter, but here unleashing the roiling social indignation and sharp musical wit behind the cute moves and the granny specs… as well as indulging his love for Cannibal Corpse).

Making no bones about their loathing of Tory ethics and economics (although Steve has described the performance outcome, to his own surprise, as “weirdly non-partisan”), their performance is “part gig, part metal-recital, part exorcism… combin(ing) sludge and doom metal with the Budget speech 2015; a pounding subverbal deathgrowl with text samples from the blue suits at Tory HQ, George Osborne and the architects of austerity… a verbatim record of a government ripping society’s guts out… a fiercely political convergence of death metal and theatre, vocalising a response to Conservative Party policies through music, speeches, PowerPoint and rage. It’s a guttural, expressive experience made up of Tory doctrine, political contexts and the impact of austerity over the past seven years.”

You can find out more about Torycore’s own political, theatrical and musical ethics at Chris’ interview in ‘The Guardian’ a couple of years ago – in which he states that theatre is “a national laboratory for thinking about how we think and how we are and what we are” and that “at its most basic, making theatre is just a way of meeting people… part of an ongoing conversation that can take place anywhere.” – or in this 2014 interview for the Mayfest homepage, in which Lucy and Steve discuss the more complex concerns behind the blunt hammerblow of the music: notably Lucy’s fascination with government perversion of language, reinforced by Steve’s point that “they’ve colonised the language that ought to be used to tear down the structure that protects them. So everything from ‘fairness’ to ‘democracy’ has been corrupted. Hence the need for a project like this, that throws those words back, stripped of all the pomp and bullshit that parliamentary process wraps around this rarified implementation of fascism-lite.” Lucy, meanwhile, fleshes out her mirror-method condemnation: “I’d like them to be sent to their run-for-profit detention centres. To be “visited by Atos”. To spend time with the families of those people who have killed themselves rather than fall further into fear and poverty. “We’re all in this together” right?”

The evenings which evolved into the raffish, absurdist Clerkenwell ARTSlab events were originally run by beloved performance poet/proto-antifolker John Hegley. Although they’re now run by “twisted folk” band Diego Brown & The Good Fairy, much of Hegley’s sense of fun has stuck to them: they’re ongoing salons of “mind-bending song, stories and weird stuff… comedy and cha-cha from the kings and queens of all that”.

As usual, Diego and co. headline with their spooky, surreal, pointed London chansonnerie (puppets and automata optional), but also rolling up are three other songwriters. Parenthesis is a “prince of smooth-talking, forward-thinking, backward-walking electronic pop”. New Yorker-turned-Londoner Maya Levy, when not acting or otherwise making theatre, turns to the piano to write darkly funny folk/classical/theatre crossover songs either for herself or her band The Kitchen Quartet, (covering “medieval werewolves to Pocahontas to crazy teachers”). Hannah Lovell delivers soft-spoken, almost conversational portraits of domestic life and then hangs them askew – the solicitous hatred of one’s partner, the mental breakdowns over cooking the perfect Italian meal.

On the more overtly theatrical side, storytelling clown Alys Torrance will deliver her story of “the amazing feats performed by Stanley Gibbons’s’s’s Amazing Stamp Collection (bring binoculars/reading specs).” Somewhere in the middle is the Julian Fox/Bob Karper collaboration Streatham Common (Station): fifteen minutes of offbeat theatre songwriters Julian Fox and Bob Karper, “accordions and beats, deadpan and dance, songs and maybe film.” (The latter are still too much of a elusive fringe phenomenon to have much web presence, but I’ve included a Julian song below: a Kraftwerkian one about designing airports).

“Scotland comes to New River and it’s going to be a spooky psychedelic affair.

“Pefkin is the alter ego of Gayle Brogan, one half of Glaswegian vintage synth duo Electroscope and ex-proprietor of the Boa Melody Bar mail order. She has been recording as Pefkin since 1999 and released albums on Morc, Wild Silence, Reverb Worship, Pseudoarcana etc. More recently she has been recording with the Kitchen Cynics‘ Alan Davidson, creating psych-folk hymnals inspired by a mutual love of folk songs and nature, and has been recording with United Bible Studies. On her own Gayle creates a dreamy rural psychedelia from looped vocals, guitar, analogue synth and violin. She is currently recording an album inspired by the recumbent stone circles of Aberdeenshire.

“Bell Lungs (vocals/electric guitar/electric violin) is from Scotland and has previously performed in the USA, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK, in curious locations such as an abandoned grain silo, a hydro-electric power station inside a mountain, the top deck of a double-decker bus and amidst the eerie, moving sculptures of Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre. She will be playing an immersive continuously-morphing set that will carry you from the Western Isles of Scotland to the rainforest and outer space.

“Support from Russell Walker of Pheromoans fame and Bomber Jackets infamy. He has also written a book. The book is great, very funny. I saw Russell play at Tatty Seaside Towns‘ most recent event in the famed ‘Naughty Corner’. Me and Barney Wakefield were trying to have a serious conversation but it was IMPOSSIBLE because of this set. He was reading some very funny, misanthropic, storioes/poetry about some ‘people’ either real or unreal. Scathing and mundane in equal measure which is the sign of a good cook. Great with kids. (His son is the spitting image of my nephew… I didn’t want to mention it at the time, ‘cuz that’s probably a strange thing for stranger to bring up on first meeting).

“David CW Briggs will open the proceedings! Dave used to play in Unlabel band Cove and was playing solo under the moniker Hills Have Riffs for a while. He drinks a lot of tea and is great with kids.”

“Yoni Silver is a multi-instrumentalist (specialising in bass clarinet and electronics), composer, improvisor and performer. He plays in a number of projects, including the Hyperion Ensemble. This is Yoni’s first openJack appearance, but he’s back a few weeks later with his trio, Denis D’or.

“Eden Grey‘s music is an experimental mix influenced by electro, dub, d’n’b, techno, drone, ambient and hip-hop. Her music took a major shift towards the collage-based methods of the historical avant-garde while earning her Masters’ degree in music technology and after she began building her modular synthesizer in 2013. Eden also hosts the CV FREQS meetups for the London Modular Synthesis Group.

This is another of the leftfield gigs organised by reedswoman/noise-fiddler and curator Chlöe Herington (Chrome Hoof, Knifeworld, V A L V E, Half The Sky), and here’s what she has to say about it:

“Magnus Loom wildly turns and tumbles through a cornucopia of brightly burning pitches and rhythms, howling and whispering, in his own world of avant-punk cabaret. According to his Facebook page, “Magnus Loom makes a noise, and lives in hope that one day others might enjoy it as much as he does.” It’s really good noise. I reckon you’ll enjoy his noise.

“The two support acts are both performing debut gigs. Zoey Gunshot is political noises and anti-folk; Flying Saucer is experimental noises, a bit Jonathan Richmond tinged with Bob Drake.“

This coming week, dEUS singer Tom Barman and saxophonist Robin Verheyen launch a European tour for their art-rock/narrative-tinged jazz band TaxiWars, taking in the Netherlands, England, France, Germany, Austria and Belgium.

Completed by two of Robin’s fellow New York-based Belgian jazzmen (double bass player Nicolas Thys and rising drummer Antoine Pierre) and partially inspired by Tom’s tendency to immerse himself in old Blue Note and Impulse label records when on dEUS downtime, TaxiWars have a motile smooth/gruff sound. They focus on structures, scenes and subleties rather than solos; taking sparks and smoulders from Charles Mingus, Art Blakey, Max Roach, Pharoah Sanders and Artie Shepp (while, on the pop side, padding after the demi-monde restlessness of Morphine and Prince). The band’s second album, ‘Fever’, came out earlier this month.

For most of the dates the band seem to be playing alone (in jazz-friendly mid-to-late night sets), but some of the gigs feature guest performers in support slots. What’s happening at their two English shows remains a bit of a mystery, even a handful of days beforehand. For the tour debut in Lille, they’re supported by Red, the lo-fi Franco-Americana project by genre-restless experimental musician Olivier Lambin, featuring what he refers to variously and obscurely as “unprivate blues” containing ingredients like “hack analog electro, wooden guitar, the noises of planets and stars.” (On record, much of it sounds like home recordings interpenetrated by eerie and slightly disturbing sonic moods, offsetting the gentleness of the singing with a disreputable, disassociative air. I’ve no idea how he’ll work that kind of grubby magic live…)

Back in Belgium, TaxiWars’ show at Evergem will also feature solo sets from two of Tom Barman’s dEUS colleagues – the band’s early-‘90s guitarist Rudy Trouvé and its current-but-soon to-depart guitarist (and Evil Superstars frontman) Mauro Pawlowski. Rudy promises “an intimate set interrupted by animation… something between classic singer-songwriter action and a ‘70s evening with slides”, while Mauro isn’t promising anything in particular besides “new and old work in a crisp, casual and funny way”. However, the two men (both promiscuously-collaborating Belgian art-music veterans who’ve played together extensively in both Love Substitutes and Kiss My Jazz) are holding out the prospect of a collaborative duet – perhaps in the line of their duet set in Oude Beurs at the start of the month. Tasters from both Rudy and Mauro are below.

Rudy will reappear for three of TaxiWars’ four appearances at Belgium’s multi-town, multi-venue Autumn Falls festival, in which he’s playing support again as part of regular improvising trio Tape Cuts Tape. A collaboration with Lynn Cassiers and Eric Thielemans, they’re now onto their third record of kosmiche-and-dub-inspired drone-grooves, re-wrangled baroque chamber influences, spacious experimental sound-stagings and unexpectedly tender tunefulness.

The first of the Autumn Falls shows (in Brussels) also sees TaxiWars sharing the bill with some serious jazz talent. There’ll be a set from the award-winning young Italian jazz trombonist Gianluca Petrella – since he’s playing solo, expect a set with copious loops, processing and effects. There’ll also be one by Swiss-born/Brooklyn-based pianist, composer and improviser Sylvie Courvoisier, featuring her trio with drummer Kenny Wollesen and bass player Drew Gress (a lineup which, in addition to Sylvie’s prolific work as a leader or co-leader, encompasses work with Sonny Stitt, John Zorn, Cab Calloway, Tim Berne, Jack DeJohnette, Tom Waits, Norah Jones, Bill Frisell and Ellery Eskelin).

Being a Londoner might well give a person readier access to a wider day-to-day world than someone in a smaller British town (and you can read the same for anyone in a world city anywhere), but it also allows that person to become ignorant in the finer closer details, closed off from the simple knowledge that people in quieter places still come up with, or strive towards, interesting things. Part of what I’m doing with myself this year is actively trying to shed some of those blinkers, looking around outside the slew of London gigs I post about to find out what’s going on elsewhere.

Despite hearing about a longstanding enmity between “town” and “gown” in the city, I hadn’t made the necessary connections between Durham, economic poverty, commercial collapse and underground culture; probably because I’ve only previously swept through the town on the East Coast Main Line en route to Newcastle or Edinburgh, admiring the cathedral and the university castle from the insulation of the viaduct. (Like I told you. Londoner. Just plain ignorant.) If at some point I’d got my complacent arse down to street level and asked around, I might have found out more. Behind the mediaeval heritage prettiness and pleasant prospects there are indeed the same kind of economic problems which worm through the country as a whole and gnaw the north-east in particular. There are businesses failing and boarding up, and people becoming reduced to relying on food banks; there’s a sense of community which might dissolve under hunger and the decay of opportunity and moribundity; there are people whose lives might just peter out into a broke greyness; and none of this can be solved simply by proximity to a couple of World Heritage sites.

This is where the Empty Shop organization have come in during the last decade, making a local attempt to address the problems. They’re non-profit, aiming to make enough money to sustain a lively local arts culture and provide the platform for it to thrive. They also aim to make a thrifty, practical use of existing facilities instead of splurging on showcase showoff developments: their concerts, theatre and film shows, exhibitions and other events are housed in buildings which have fallen silent or empty, thereby ensuring that those places don’t fall into decay or become a town centre like a strip of dead teeth. Their gig calendar, too, is littered with events which raise collections for food banks: benefit shows which don’t sell themselves as such, since benefits don’t have to be special events but can be living, breathing regular exchanges of community resources, part of the fabric of being connected.

I’ve got three of this week’s upcoming Empty House gigs listed below – a punky sandwich with a surprisingly plush pop middle. I’m sure they’ll be the first of many which I’ll be flagging up in the future. For what it’s worth, both of the Equestrian Collective shows (the punkier ones, with perhaps a broader DIY communitarian ethic to suit) are food-bank all-age events.

As Ondas‘ press release is essentially just a mass of pop-culture fibs, which tells me that they don’t take a complicated reputation seriously and that they’ve got one eye on the possibility of jamming themselves into evenings of campery and frills. Buried in the waffle is the phrase “no-wave-surf, trilingual indie band”, which will do, although it doesn’t convey their touch of fun. They’ve got a little lava-lamp shimmy as well as clean punky lines and a surfboard twang; they’re bouncy and lounge-y in the same way that Os Mutantes were, with an elusive, mercurial intelligence in their approach.

Middlesbrough punks Year Of Birds make a few fibbing pop claims of their own (they wrote a third of the songs on Gabrielle’s ‘Rise’… yeah, hmmm…), Instead I can hear bits of West Coast pop, German motorik and a broader psychedelia in their short-order songs. There’s the cyclic two-chord pulse of early Teardrop Explodes for instance (albeit a Teardrops who gave their work a couple of extra spins in a dirty cement mixer) and there’s Syd Barrett – or Robyn Hitchcock – in their precise English diction behind their frontman’s faraway, heavy-lidded baritone and its megaphone distortions. On top of that, they sometimes slip into a discoloured version of that chromium early-Neu! chug and have fluctuating taste for cosmic synth twitters. While none of that makes them Gong-family caperers or dedicated autobahnauts there’s no way that they could hold a bored English punk anomie for more than a few seconds without cracking an eye-twinkle. Their cover of Donna Summers’ I Feel Love (delivered in what’s best described as an ecstatic tannoy monotone) is a small piece of smogged-up Yorkshire wit and Space Dusted joy.

There’s another band on, apparently. There’s no word on who they are. There are rumblings about them having invented fuzzy-felt. If that’s a clue, it belongs to a story or a joke which I’m not in on. Sorry. Show up and see for yourselves.

How long have Heir been hiding in Leeds, and where did they find a place to hide and do their growing up so secretly? Their debut EP’s only been out since March, their debut single’s barely a year old; but it seems as if they’ve arrived fully matured.

Heir are one of those enviable pure pop bands that covers virtually all bases. Accomplished sophisti-pop recombiners, they’re universal enough to hit Radio 2 playlists, to soundtrack summer picnics and sell bucketloads of records in supermarkets, but they’re still tuneful and dynamic enough to disarm and win over sharper tastes. There’s plenty of quiet-storm emotiveness in those finely-crafted, deceptively simple songs; clever feather-soft steals of space and atmosphere from trip-hop; and there are lessons well-learned from upper-drawer pop-soul, with hints of both Smokey Robinson or Commodores. Best of all are the gorgeous fraternal bursts of bell-like man-harmonies which back up and refract Tom Hammond’s sweet-and-sore lead vocal, right when they’re needed. (Think the Finn Brothers, or Francis Dunnery; but always bring it back to that soul source, of men stretching and basking in the sweet spot between church and itch.)

Sure, enough, the support slots and the BBC Radio plays are already coming their way. Of course, it could all go horribly wrong. Heir might follow a substantial path along the past lines of Elbow (the band whom they most resemble in their gusty Northern blueness) or Deacon Blue. On the other hand we could be seeing them at an early peak before rapid success and co-opting buffs or Barlowises that clear edge and talent; drives it down into frictionless sleekness, into something transient to lube the gaps between acts on ‘The X-Factor’. They might end up putting out no more than a couple of albums before going their separate ways, following many a fine performer in slipping invisibly behind the scenes to write toplines for anonymous r&b stars.

Right now, though, Heir are honed and treasurable. This will be an intimate acoustic show (fine with me, as long as they cheat and keep the Rhodes switched on) and at this point you can still get close enough and persuasive enough to reassure them that they should never swap the joy of singing to people for the staleness of singing to a demographic. Or, if you’re aiming to be a bitter old git, you could go in order to stockpile memories of that time you saw Heir when they still really had it.

Taking the support slot, Rebekah Finch (originally established in Belfast, but developing in Durham) offers her own pop songs. Though she cites Lana Del Rey and Florence + The Machine as influences, both her Hosanna single and various demos suggest a talent that’s both more slippery and more direct, pitched as it is between airy flights of positivity and the quick jabs of doubts and home truths. Well, that often worked pretty well for Stevie Nicks, whose mixture of tenderness and steely force Rebekah seems to be leaning towards; and whose gravel-and-honey tones she sometimes echoes amidst the dabs of soul and gospel. Promising.

On the second of the two Equestrian nights, Captain Chaos –a.k.a Plan It X records boss Chris Clavin – headlines. A folk-punk legend, he’s played in more bands than it’s fruitful to list and his particular talent has outlasted all of them.

As he always does, he’s hauled a battered acoustic guitar, a hatful of gawk and a bag of witty, off-kilter songs all the way from his Indiana home and over state lines and seas, to touch down somewhere where he knows he’ll have an audience to share and play with. His songs are shaggy dog tales, or carefully honed stand-up routines in melody and verse with little zingers at the end, or comically gonzoid rearrangements of personal quirks. You’ll laugh at him and with him; you’ll want to buy him bar snacks; you’ll want him to come back.

Glasgow “song weaver”Chrissy Barnacle is still young enough to be showing plenty of influences – in particular Bob Dylan in the propulsive clawhammer fingerpicking and the densely worded lyrical shambles, and early Joanna Newsom in both the efflorescent femininity of her tumbling trains of thought and that yawp in her voice. But give her some more time – starting with some of your own. From what I can hear, she’s still a talent in development; taking a little longer to shake off her first roots, a bud who’s pushing hard to emerge in full.

What’s emerged already, though, already impressive. I just think that there’s going to be a moment in which all of those influences finally come into alignment, something clicks into place and they become integrated rather than transparent. That moment might even be this coming Monday. I guess that I’ll have to keep checking in.

Durham’s own Mama Lips sometimes went under the name of Andrew and mostly writes comics; but she also pens and performs upfront, supportive anti-folk songs for the queer of all kinds and especially the transgendered (as well as for those who empathise with them). Her brand new “Fairy Godmother’ EP is about “surviving in our identities, and our fairy godmothers who take care of us,” and she clearly doesn’t give a fuck about anyone who might sneer at her failure to prioritise bitchiness, snark and irony, since there are more urgent things to concentrate on first. Apparently she has other, raunchier songs in the bag, and if we’re good she’ll teach us about the hanky code. (I was impatient, so I cheated…)

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As I said, I’m sure that I’m going to be looking up more Empty House Durham gigs in the future, but there’s enough here already to make me wish that I’d gotten off that train earlier.

Having already made a showing at Liverpool and Bristol during October, peripatetic techno-pop/IDM composer Holly Herndon brings her expanded show to London. This is a full multi-media experience including the usual music, visuals and dance elements but with an interactive component that goes far beyond Holly’s onstage collaborations with programmer/life partner Mat Dryhurst and with interpretative dancer/additional singer Colin Self. In particular, Mat’s adaptive and conceptual SAGA software reaches out beyond the stage to work – consensually – with the audience members’ own browser histories and Facebook content; mixing it all into the visuals (and, potentially, the sounds) as a communal mashup, both representational and communicatory.

Intriguing as this factor is, it’s an adjunct to Holly’s music; which remains the core material of the show. Continually glitched, tweaked and deconstructed, her compositions are a cool, complex, thoughtful and exhilarating mixture. They’re informed by post-classical forms, dance techno, and anthemic synth pop; they utilize experimental textures and broad vocal stylings (from standard singing to semi-voluntary sounds) and they bury philosophical queries deep within their tunes. Holly’s soundwork is as immersive as her stagings, full of implied questions and reflections regarding our access to and immersion in technology and how this affects the way in which we think and express ourselves, leaving comet-trails of information, interaction and yearnings.

All of these additional subtexts and pointers are there if you want them, but Holly is first and foremost a communicating musician, and her pieces are as melodious and accessible as they are multi-layered. Drawing on her ongoing music studies (doctorate level at Stanford) , her time as a precocious and enquiring teenager steeped in the heat and fun of the Berlin club scene, and her work with everything from choirs to customised laptop software, they sometimes sound like particularly complicated pop songs, stuttering their way through myriad changes of attention and focus. Sometimes they sound like accelerated dream-state dances; sometimes like madrigals sung during earthquakes (see Unequal, below). At other times, they’re like the chatter of path-switching in a circuit; or like carefully-directed cultural channel-surfings which quick-step deftly back and forth across a breadth of urban art and experience (from grand opera house to downloads in cramped bedsits). Brain food which encourages you to wander.

Also on the bill are Jam City and Claire Tolan, both of whom share Holly’s interest in interactions and in the results of our being embedded within a dense informational culture, although each has their own way of approaching the situation.

Jam City is the alias of dance-electronica producer and deconstructionist Jack Latham. Though Jack’s background in fashion and “corporate espionage” sounds almost too good to be true, as if it’s been dream-tailored for counter-cultural media discussions and for high-end elitist posing, he doesn’t use it that way. As a musician, he’s evolved from collaging various dubstep tropes towards using his work to develop and express questioning, outright political critiques of neoliberal capitalism (such as the Unhappy single, which explores the dulled angst of online porn consumers while juxtaposing it with riot footage). In the process, Jack’s also developed as a performer – backgrounding the laptops and the passive role of the standard electronica performer in order to retake the stage as guitarist and singer, and delivering a new phase of material described as sounding like “a Prince record constructed from cold, chunky industrial sounds”.

Claire Tolan is an artist, programmer, sampler, writer and soundscaper specializing in autonomous sensory meridian r – a psychological process in which carefully-arranged sound and speech – usually a blend of themed, targeted whispers and quiet diegetic noises (scratches, scuffs, intimate room sounds) – triggers euphoric physical and mental reactions in the listener. With sharp wit, Claire links all of this to new developments in programming and acoustic surveillance technologies, exploring the question of how it might be applied: from simple mood enhancements and healing systems through to neurolinguistics and perception and to the potential manipulation and control of people. Her recent Holly Herndon collaboration Lonely At The Top (see below) might give some clues as to her concert performance. A cosseting monologue, coffee-pot dribbles and the close-up noises of small rooms are interspersed with the rubs and slaps of massage, fingernails ticking on keyboards and screens, and increasingly intimate sounds of hand and mouth: the language, desires and end results of relaxation tapes, executive relief, socially-reinforced senses of entitlement and prostitution blend and overlap to sardonic, disturbing effect.

Information and tickets for the concert are here while the Facebook event page is here. At the end of the month, Holly will also be appearing at All Tomorrow’s Parties at Prestatyn.

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There are some similarities between Holly Herndon and Laura Moody – not least an overlap with classical music and a sense of being on the outcrops of songcraft, delving up malleable truths and questions. Yet whereas Holly’s a post-classical theoretician (reconciling her education with her human instincts, and with life outside the college bubble) and works primarily on computer, Laura comes from older and more familiar traditions, and is almost exclusively an acoustic performer. Possessing outstanding talent both as a singer and as a cellist – and able to cover both fields simultaneously, as well as beatboxing and cello-drumming – she pounces into her own music with the terrifying, exhilarating technical skills of a top-drawer classical soloist.

Laura’s songwriting instinct, meanwhile, seem to come from multiple directions at once. Tense twentieth-century string figures (from her earlier years playing avant-garde pieces with the Meredith Monk Ensemble, and her current work with the Elysian Quartet); ancient, eerie folk airs; expressionist opera; P.J. Harvey’s cleaver intensity; the clever, idiosyncratic and individual art pop of a Kate Bush, a Tom Waits or a Bjork. Everything that she delivers sounds immediate, whether it’s the savagely equivocal hormonal take-down of an older man on Creeping Alopecia, the raindrop attenuations of Call This Time Love, or the stormy dissections of love-gone-wrong and betrayal on Turn Away and We Are Waiting.

The live gigs are enthralling wonders: supple switchings between Laura’s own welcoming personality and the performance persona which handles the songs, blurring the line of physicality which separates woman and cello. She’s out on a brief tour now, playing outside London for a few events. Go see for yourselves.

For many female pop musicians, an increasingly outright or explicit public sexuality is both a marketing point and the prime hook. To an extent, this is also true of Jenny Hval. Many people will have initially heard about her thanks to what seemed to be a head-turningly saucy lyric:“I arrived in town with an electric toothbrush pressed against my clitoris.” Curious (and possibly a little numbed by Rihanna, plus memories of lubricious Prince party-funk), many of us will have followed this expecting a licentious slow jam, only to find something very different – the opening line of a mirror-calm songscape of hovering bells, limpid murmurs and breathed-on acoustic guitars which dealt with the secret worlds of strangers within cities and, in particular, their self-reliance.

A polymath whose methods blur as artfully as her perspectives, Jenny doesn’t write songs so much as drop carefully-charged texts and pointers, and then explore and adorn these recitatives with chantlike melodies and poised minimal instrumental textures, pulling them apart and working in and out of the word-rhythms. Her guitars, keyboards and samplers (as well as her heavy-lashed, light-tongued vocals) work like soft-edged sculpting tools. Her lyrics are the lines of resistance.

For both new listeners and previous converts, sexuality remains a prime Hval hook. It’s what we expect to hear from her, although we’ve quickly learnt to appreciate that she turns the expected approaches on their heads and back-to-front. She revels in the unfixed: in the course of a single song, lovers will pass fluidly from mysterious passion to friendship to absence, and between gender, ages, species or state. Even when singing of cupping her own cunt (while cupping the blunt, unadorned and troublesome word itself, delivered throughout her songbook without a hint of shame, taboo or aggression and with a succinct matter-of-fact poise) she’ll let the action lead her somewhere that doesn’t fit the usual expectations and commodities – appreciating its centrality at her body’s core; being inspired to cup in turn a lover’s “soft dick… accepting restlessness, accepting no direction, accepting this fearful wanting that isn’t desire… can we just lie here being?”; or imagining a world of peaceful masturbators (“a million bedrooms with hands softly lulling… without telling anyone, a million ships come alone out on the calmest seas”) while asking, with a sense of disquiet “are we loving ourselves now? Are we mothering ourselves?”

Also running through Jenny’s work (whether entwined with or separate from the sexual themes), are ambiguous accounts of bodily disintegration. Opening her second album ‘Innocence Is Kinky’ with an account of watching online porn, she moves from commodified enervation into an eerie and exultant dream of escape, relinquishing her own body and its passive needs, and finally symbolically destroying the eyes with which she consumes the images. Yet this song and its sisters aren’t quite nightmares. Sometimes they’re triumphs – disassociative fantasies of freedom in which the wrack and ruin seem to be the natural rites of passage of a cool mind walking free, unconcerned, its passions become processes.

Jenny’s writing casts a wide net – violent upsets echoing classic French surrealism; deep-running strands of myth both classical and original (from the “Oslo Oedipus” of Innocence Is Kinky to the dark, quasi-pagan tree-figure in Amphibious, Androgynous that stands as lover, doppelganger and the next phase of self); and musings on the ambiguous trap of language (“the tongue is upon for the restless /An indecipherable alphabet / Each word an island less… And we speak in tongues from part to parts, broke all to parts / From invisible state, to invisible state…”). Most recently, on her latest album ‘Apocalypse, Girl’ the political subtexts have broken cover to become direct challenges (“You say I’m free now, that battle is over, / and feminism is over and socialism’s over. / Yeah, I say, I can consume what I want now..”). So too have preoccupations with ageing and survival (in the breathless narrative of Heaven, surrounded by loops and fractures of cemeteries and childhood choirs, Jenny wrestles with the pull of memory and the drag of mortality) and a increasingly solid approach to identity. “What is it to take care of yourself? Getting paid? Getting laid? Getting married? Getting pregnant? Fighting for visibility in your market? Realizing your potential? Being healthy, being clean, not making a fool of yourself, not hurting yourself? Shaving in all the right places?”

All of the above – the obliqueness and the rapier hits – makes listening to Jenny’s records akin to haunting her apartment at 2am (or some similar time when manners and manneredness come unstuck and the shapes of other truths come walking). I’ve not been fortunate enough to see what her music is like live – though I know that past concert showings have seen her play bolstered with guests or simply alone, surrounded by laptops, devices and ideas. On the five quick dates of her current UK tour, you’ll be able to see for yourselves.

On the Glasgow, Manchester and Bristol dates, Jenny will be joined by her on-off tourmate Briana Marela, a singer-songwriter from the Pacific North-West who’s currently working a string of European tour dates in support of her second album ‘All Around Us’. As you might expect from something recorded in Iceland and co-produced with Sigur Rós associate Alex Somers, ‘All Around Us’ is ghosted and garnished with touches of Hopelandic enchantment (with beautiful smeared, paper-thin sounds intruding on the edge of the mix, like lost amnesiac ghosts or distant pipes), but it’s very much Briana’s inspiration – a luminous, thoughtful work blending layered melodic sample-patches and banking her petal-delicate vocals into choirs and a capella counterpoint.

Though Briana cites Björk, Laura Veirs, Vashti Bunyan and Meredith Monk as influences (she has something in common with Laura Moody, then), I can also hear the same kind of all-round sound-mastery that’s on display and working away in the songs of Imogen Heap; deep-level sonic exploration and sound curation tied to the urge to tell you a story and sing you a straight earworm. In the album’s lead single Surrender I can even hear something of the pure pop of ABBA, while the midnight lushness of the follow-up, Dani, recalls a Julee Cruise ‘Twin Peaks’ ballad.

Though Briana’s voice is soft, it’s never wispy – never insubstantial. If there’s a hint of girl-next-door to what she does, she’s the quiet, observant girl full of thoughts, going her own way but ready to let you walk alongside. Like Jenny, though less explicitly, she explores possibilities of intimacy. Her songs hover carefully on the borderline between selfhood and loneliness, a delicate staking out of possible togetherness, subtly resisting the pressures to put out or submit, to be deformed by needs and expectations (“What does love mean in this day and age? / To me it’s a moment where we resonate at two frequencies close in phase… / It’s not a competition / Everyone has music within them.” ). Meanwhile, the perfectly-pitched American-visionary tone of the album (its hallucinatory fairy-tale sonics, leaflike piano falls and misty country swells) suggests that there’s common ground between Briana’s dream pop and the ostensibly cleaner work of breakthrough CCM-pop singers like Lexi Elisha, which in turn suggests that there’ll be a lot of people who’ll end up liking this.

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In between dates with Jenny Hval, Briana Marela will also be joining the bill at another Illuminations concert in London, this one a stew of assorted flavours which also includes the battered Americana of Lift To Experience frontman Josh T. Pearsonand the skewed Tyneside noise-troubadour work of Richard Dawson.

Probably because of the female orientation of this particular post, I’ve got to admit that I’m more intrigued by the youngest act on the bill, and the only other female one. It’s difficult to work out just how tongue-in-cheek the “psychedelic rag-doll sludge-pop” duo Let’s Eat Grandma are, assuming that they’re joking at all. Eyes down, singing from beneath and behind tumbling pre-Raphaelite locks, and tucked into stolen Stevie Nicks dresses, Rosa and Jenny rummage with various instruments like toybox-divers and play songs as if it’s only occurred to them to do so. Two Norwich teenagers who’ve known each other since childhood, they’ve sustained, into near adulthood, that mysterious blankness of two little girls who are ignoring your interruptions to their game. The songs themselves are tangled musical fairy stories, or (as with ‘Eat Shiitake Mushrooms Into Chocolate Sludge Cake’) extended wooden-legged instrumental mantras owing more to Faust or Beefheart: spontaneous-seeming, utterly absorbed in themselves. The band feels like a musical chrysalis twitching what might become an astounding breadth of wing. It’s all to discover.

Mock Deer is Ricky Damiani, a singer and songwriter based in London.A self-taught musician with a unique playing and writing style, he has spent the majority of his life in the north of England and has re-immersed himself in the capital’s alt-folk scene over recent years, playing shows for excellent local promoters including The Local, Folklore and Folkroom. He has also played in Germany with Fourtrack and The Grey Sky Sessions.

As well as writing original music for theatre and television and releasing a home recorded EP (‘Cold And Bright‘) Ricky’s renewed involvement in the live music scene has seen him play shows supporting great acts such as The Burning Hell and Sam Brookes and at several UK festivals, including Festival No. 6, Ramsbottom Festival, The End Festival, Uncivilization Festival and Ymuno.

He recently went back into the studio with friends and collaborators Benjamin Yellowitz and members of alt-country band Dead Flowers to record his next Mock Deer release – the ‘How We Used To Live’ EP – and many of them will be joining him to perform and launch the EP at this concert. The lead track, Pork Chop Suits, has been released as a Soundcloud single and can be streamed below.

Support comes from the most excellent singer/songwriter Joe Innes, leader of offbeat and often irreverent indie/alt/anti-folk band Joe Innes & The Cavalcade, purveyors of a loud and energetic live show that gets audiences clicking and howling (literally) and has won the band favourable comparisons to The Decemberists, Bright Eyes and The Mountain Goats. Joe Innes & The Cavalcade have played some of the biggest festivals in the UK including Cambridge Folk Festival, Camp Bestival and Secret Garden Party, and supported incredible artists like Caitlin Rose, Anais Mitchell, Sea of Bees and Toby Goodshank. Their last EP, released in June 2014, was the widely-acclaimed ‘Brian, I’m a Genius Too‘.

Up-to-date information on the concert can be found here and here, and tickets are available here. Seventeen tickets are still available as I post…